Races of the Origin World

Humans hold the most cities and the most positions in Saint Dora, and are the shortest-lived of the three races, never reaching a hundred. The government, the academies, the aviation authority, the Bureau—on the rolls of these institutions human names are the most numerous, and they turn over the fastest as well. A file passing through three generations of hands is nothing unusual in Saint Dora.

On the streets of Saint Tranya the three races living mixed together is routine. Nobody in a maglev carriage looks twice at anyone, every stall takes anyone's money, and queues run in the order people arrive. But the moment it comes to crossing a border, the rules put on a different face: the corridors you can travel are limited, and the people who can get a permit are more limited still.

The Orcs are densest across the Badlands. They have nothing like Saint Dora's bound archives; what they rely on is oral transmission—and it is precisely because they rely on oral transmission that a good many fragments of the War of the Three Races have survived in Orc hands instead, passed down generation to generation, with even the placement of the pauses carried across intact.

The three races colonised the Frozen Continent together and slaughtered each other on it for 500 years, then each withdrew to their own continent. On who struck first and who owes whom, the songs of the three regions each sing their own version, and even the opening line doesn't match.

"The three races" is itself a Saint Dora way of putting it. The Dawn Continent doesn't order them that way, and the old people of the Badlands don't use the term at all—when they speak of that war, they use another name for it.

The Elves divide into seven branches: the White Elves, the Tree Elves, the Dark Elves, the Water Elves, the Fire Elves, the Moon Elves, and the seventh kind, mentioned least of all. They are scattered across the Dawn Continent and those islands that never see daylight, and the dealings between branches are not necessarily closer than their dealings with outsiders.

What the war left behind is treaties and procedure. The Dawn Continent Observation Bureau is a cross-racial research body founded only after the Saint Dora government signed accords with each of the Dawn Elven peoples, with headquarters in a small coastal town at the southern end of Saint Dora, the nearest point to the Ice-Shadow Trench.

The Bureau's staff are among the few holding legal cross-border permits, travelling that special corridor 6 times a year on a fixed schedule; miss a run and you wait for the next window. Getting into the Bureau means first sitting for the investigator's licence, a licence good for decades, and when it changes hands the files are handed over whole, with anything that can't be taken along burned on the spot.